At Last (13 page)

He leant forward and grabbed the front corners of the cushion, tilting sideways to go into a steep left turn.

‘Let’s get a move on,’ said Kettle, clapping her hands together impatiently. ‘It’s costing me a fortune to keep this taxi waiting. What are you doing staring at the ceiling?’ she snapped at Robert.

‘Thinking.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

The two boys followed Kettle into the frail old-fashioned cage of a lift that took them to the ground floor of her building. She seemed to calm down once she told the taxi driver to take them to the Onslow Club, but by then both Robert and Thomas felt too upset to talk. Sensing their reluctance, Kettle started to interrogate them about their schools. After dashing some dull questions against their proud silence, she gave in to the temptation of reminiscing about her own schooldays: Sister Bridget’s irresistible charm towards the parents, especially the grander ones, and her high austerity towards the girls; the hilarious report in which Sister Anna had said that it would take ‘divine intervention’ to make Kettle into a mathematician.

Kettle carried on with her complacent self-deprecation as the taxi rumbled down the Fulham Road. The brothers withdrew into their private thoughts, only emerging when they stopped outside the club.

‘Oh, look, there’s Daddy,’ said Robert, lunging out ‘Oh, look, there’s Daddy,’ said Robert, lunging out of the taxi ahead of his grandmother.

‘Don’t wait for me,’ said Kettle archly.

‘Okay,’ said Thomas, following his brother into the street and running up to his father.

‘Hello, Dada,’ he said, jumping into Patrick’s arms. ‘Guess what I’ve been doing? I’ve been watching
Aladdin
! Not
Bin
Laden but
A
-laddin.’ He chuckled mischievously, patting both Patrick’s cheeks at once.

Patrick burst out laughing and kissed him on the forehead.

As he arrived at the entrance of the Onslow Club, with Thomas still in his arms and Robert walking by his side, Patrick heard the distant but distinct sound of Nicholas Pratt disgorging his opinions on the pavement behind him.

‘A celebrity these days is somebody you’ve never heard of,’ Nicholas boomed, ‘just as “
j’arrive
” is what a French waiter says as he hurries away from you in a Paris cafe. Margot’s fame belongs to a bygone era: one actually knows who she is! Nevertheless, to write five autobiographies is going too far. Life is life and writing is writing and if you write as Margot does, like a glass of water on a rainy day it can only dilute the effect of whatever it was you
used
to do well.’

‘You are awful,’ said Nancy’s admiring voice.

Patrick turned around and saw Nancy, her arm locked in Nicholas’s, with a rather demoralized-looking Henry walking on her other side.

‘Who is that funny man?’ asked Thomas.

‘He’s called Nicholas Pratt,’ said Patrick.

‘He’s like Toady in a
very
grumpy mood,’ said Thomas.

Patrick and Robert both laughed as much as Nicholas’s proximity allowed.

‘She said to me,’ Nicholas continued in his coy simpering voice, ‘“I know it’s my fifth book, but there always seems to be more to say.” If one says nothing in the first place, there always
is
more to say: there’s everything to say. Ah, Patrick,’ Nicholas checked himself, ‘how thrilling to be introduced, at my advanced age, to a new club.’ He peered with exaggerated curiosity at the brass plaque on a white stucco pillar. ‘The Onslow Club, I don’t remember ever hearing it mentioned.’

He’s the last one, thought Patrick, watching Nicholas’s performance with cold detachment, the last of my parents’ friends left alive, the last of the guests who used to visit Saint-Nazaire when I was a child. George Watford and Victor Eisen and Anne Eisen are dead, even Bridget, who was so much younger than Nicholas, is dead. I wish he would drop dead as well.

Patrick lazily retracted his murderous desire to get rid of Nicholas. Death was the kind of boisterous egomaniac that needed no encouragement. Besides, being free, whatever that might mean, couldn’t depend on Nicholas’s death, or even on Eleanor’s.

Still, her death pointed to a post-parental world that Nicholas’s presence was obstructing. His perfectly rehearsed contempt was a frayed cable connecting Patrick to the social atmosphere of his childhood. Patrick’s one great ally during his troubled youth had always loathed Nicholas. Victor Eisen’s wife, Anne, felt that the nimbus of insanity surrounding David Melrose’s corruption had made it seem inevitable, whereas Nicholas’s decadence was more like a stylistic choice.

Nicholas straightened up and took in the children.

‘Are these your sons?’

‘Robert and Thomas,’ said Patrick, noticing a strong reluctance to put the increasingly burdensome Thomas down on the pavement next to his father’s last living friend.

‘What a pity David isn’t here to enjoy his grandsons,’ said Nicholas. ‘He would have ensured at the very least that they didn’t spend the whole day in front of the television. He was very worried about the tyranny of the cathode-ray tube. I remember vividly when we had seen some children who were practically giving birth to a television set, he said to me, “I dread to think what all that radiation is doing to their little genitals.”’

Patrick was lost for words.

‘Let’s go inside,’ said Henry firmly. He smiled at the two boys and led the party indoors.

‘I’m your cousin Henry,’ he said to Robert. ‘You came to stay with me in Maine a few years back.’

‘On that island,’ said Robert. ‘I remember. I loved it there.’

‘You must come again.’

Patrick pressed ahead with Thomas, while Nicholas, like a lame pointer following a wounded bird, hobbled after him across the black-and-white tiles of the entrance hall. He could tell that he had unsettled Patrick and didn’t want to lose the chance to consolidate his work.

‘I can’t help thinking how much your father would have enjoyed this occasion,’ panted Nicholas. ‘Whatever his drawbacks as a parent, you must admit that he never lost his sense of humour.’

‘Easy not to lose what you never had,’ said Patrick, too relieved that he could speak again to avoid the mistake of engaging with Nicholas.

‘Oh, I disagree,’ said Nicholas. ‘He saw the funny side of
everything
.’

‘He only saw the funny side of things that didn’t have one,’ said Patrick. ‘That’s not a sense of humour, just a form of cruelty.’

‘Well, cruelty and laughter,’ said Nicholas, struggling to take off his overcoat next to the row of brass hooks on the far side of the hall, ‘have always been close neighbours.’

‘Close without being incestuous,’ said Patrick. ‘In any case, I have to deal with the people who have come to mourn my mother, however much you may miss my other amazing parent.’

Taking advantage of the tangle that had briefly turned Nicholas’s overcoat into a straitjacket, Patrick doubled back to the entrance of the club.

‘Ah, look, there’s Mummy,’ he said, at last releasing Thomas onto the chequerboard floor and following him as he ran towards Mary.

‘I hate to sound like Greta Garbo, but “I want to be alone”,’ said Patrick in a ludicrous Swedish accent.

‘Again!’ said Mary. ‘Why don’t these feelings come over you when you
are
alone? That’s when you phone up to complain that you don’t get invited to parties any more.’

‘That’s true, but it’s not my mother’s after-funeral sandwiches that I have in mind. Listen, I’ll just whizz around the block, as if I was having a cigarette, and then I promise I’ll come back and be totally present.’

‘Promises, promises,’ said Mary, with an understanding smile.

Patrick saw Julia, Erasmus, and Annette coming in behind Mary and felt the stranglehold of social responsibility. He wanted to leave more than ever but at the same time realized that he wouldn’t be able to. Annette spotted Nicholas across the hall.

‘Poor Nick, he’s got into a real muddle with his overcoat,’ she said, rushing to his rescue.

‘Let me help you with that.’ She pulled at Nicholas’s sleeve and released his twisted shoulder.

‘Thank you,’ said Nicholas. ‘That fiend, Patrick, saw that I was trussed up like a turkey and simply walked away.’

‘Oh, I’m sure he didn’t mean to,’ said Annette optimistically.

Having parked his car, Johnny arrived and added to the weight of guests forcing Patrick back into the hall. As he was pushed inside by the collective pressure, Patrick saw a half-familiar grey-haired woman stepping into the club with an air of tremendous determination and asking the hall porter if there was a party for Eleanor Melrose’s funeral.

He suddenly remembered where he had seen her before. She had been in the Priory at the same time as him. He met her when he was about to leave on his abortive visit to Becky. She had surged up to him at the front door, wearing a dark green sweater and a tweedy skirt, and started to talk in an urgent and over-familiar way, blocking his path to the exit.

‘You leaving?’ she asked, not pausing for an answer. ‘I must say I don’t envy you. I love it here. I come here for a month every year, does me the world of good, gets me away from home. The thing is, I absolutely loathe my children. They’re monsters. Their father, whose guts I loathe, never disciplined them, so you can imagine the sort of horrors they’ve turned into. Of course I’ve had my part to play. I mean, I lay in bed for ten months not uttering a single syllable and then when I did start talking I couldn’t stop because of all the things that had piled up during the ten months. I don’t know what you’re in here for officially, but I have a feeling. No, listen to me. If I have one word of advice it’s “Amitriptyline”. It’s absolutely wonderful. The only time I was happy was when I was on it. I’ve been trying to get hold of it ever since, but the bastards won’t give me any.’

‘The thing is I’m trying to stop taking anything,’ said Patrick.

‘Don’t be so stupid; it’s the most marvellous drug.’

She followed him out onto the steps after his cab arrived. ‘
Amitriptyline
,’ she shouted, as if he’d been the one to tell her about it, ‘you lucky thing!’

He had not followed her fierce advice and taken up Amitriptyline; in fact in the next few months he had given up the oxazepam and the antidepressants and stopped drinking alcohol altogether.

‘It’s so weird,’ said Patrick to Johnny as they climbed the staircase to the room designated for the party, ‘a woman arrived just now who was in the Priory at the same time as me last year. She’s a complete loony.’

‘It’s bound to happen in a place like that,’ said Johnny.

‘I wouldn’t know, being completely normal,’ said Patrick.

‘Perhaps too normal,’ said Johnny.

‘Just too damn normal,’ said Patrick, pounding his fist into his palm.

‘Fortunately, we can help you with that,’ said Johnny, in the voice of a wise paternalistic American doctor, ‘thanks to Xywyz, a breakthrough medication that only employs the last four letters of the alphabet.’

‘That’s incredible!’ said Patrick, wonder-struck.

Johnny dashed through a rapid disclaimer: ‘Do not take Xywyz if you are using water or other hydrating agents. Possible side-effects include blindness, incontinence, aneurism, liver failure, dizziness, skin rash, depression, internal haemorrhaging, and sudden death.’

I don’t care,’ wailed Patrick, ‘I want it anyway. I gotta have it.’

The two men fell silent. They had been improvising little sketches for decades, since the days when they smoked cigarettes and later joints on the fire escape during breaks at school.

‘She was asking about this party,’ said Patrick, as they reached the landing.

‘Maybe she knew your mother.’

‘Sometimes the simplest explanations are the best,’ Patrick conceded, ‘although she might be a funeral fanatic having a manic episode.’

The sound of uncorking bottles reminded Patrick that it was only a year since Gordon, the wise Scottish moderator, had interviewed him before he joined the Depression Group for daily sessions. Gordon drew his attention to ‘the alcoholic behind the alcohol’.

‘You can take the brandy out of the fruitcake,’ he said, ‘but you’re still left with the fruitcake.’

Patrick, who had spent the night in a state of seething hallucination and cosmic unease, was not in the mood to agree with anything.

‘I don’t think you can take the brandy out of the fruitcake,’ he said, ‘or the eggs out of the soufflé, or the salt out of the sea.’

‘It was only a metaphor,’ said Gordon.

‘
Only
a metaphor!’ Patrick howled. ‘Metaphor is the whole problem, the solvent of nightmares. At the molten heart of things everything resembles everything else: that’s the horror.’

Gordon glanced down at Patrick’s sheet to make sure he had taken his latest dose of oxazepam.

‘What I’m really asking,’ he persevered, ‘is what have you been self-medicating for, at the end of the day, if not depression?’

‘Borderline personality, narcissistic rage, schizoid tendencies…’ Patrick suggested some plausible additions.

Gordon roared with therapeutic laughter. ‘Excellent! You’ve come in with some self-knowledge under your belt.’

Patrick glanced down the stairwell to make sure the Amitriptyline woman wasn’t nearby.

‘I saw her twice,’ he told Johnny, ‘once at the beginning of my stay and once in the middle, when I was starting to get better. The first time she lectured me on the joys of Amitriptyline, but the second time we didn’t even talk, I just saw her delivering the same speech to someone from my Depression Group.’

‘So, she was a sort of Ancient Mariner of Amitriptyline.’

‘Exactly.’

Patrick remembered his second sighting of her very clearly, because it had taken place on the pivotal day of his stay. A raw clarity had started to take over from the withdrawal and delirium of his first fortnight. He spent more and more time alone in the garden, not wanting to drown in the chatter of a group lunch, or spend any more time in his bedroom than he already did. One day he was sitting on the most secluded bench in the garden when he suddenly started to cry. There was nothing in the patch of pasty sky or the partial view of a tree that justified his feeling of aesthetic bliss; no wood pigeons thrummed on the branch, no distant opera music drifted across the lawn, no crocuses shivered at the foot of the tree. Something unseen and unprovoked had invaded his depressive gaze, and spread like a gold rush through the ruins of his tired brain. He had no control over the source of his reprieve. He had not reframed or distanced his depression; it had simply yielded to another way of being. He was crying with gratitude but also with frustration at not being able to secure a supply of this precious new commodity. He felt the depths of his own psychological materialism and saw dimly that it stood in his way, but the habit of grasping at anything that might alleviate his misery was too strong, and the sense of gratuitous beauty that had shimmered through him disappeared as he tried to work out how it could be captured and put to use.

And then the Amitriptyline woman appeared wearing the same green sweater and tweedy skirt that he had first seen her in. He remembered thinking that she must have come with a small suitcase.

‘But the bastards won’t give me any…’ she was saying to Jill, a tearful member of Patrick’s Depression Group.

Jill had run sobbing out of that morning’s session, after her suggestion that the group treat the word God as an acronym for Gift of Desperation had been greeted by the bitter and abrasive Terry with the words, ‘Excuse me while I vomit.’

Anxious to avoid conversation with the two women, Patrick bolted behind the dark lateral branches of a cedar tree.

‘You lucky thing…’ The Amitriptyline speech continued on its inevitable course.

‘But I haven’t been given any,’ Jill protested, clearly feeling the presence of God, as tears welled up in her eyes again.